Born to Polish parents in Saint Petersburg, Menzhinsky joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1902.

The trauma ended his ten-year marriage, and he left Yaroslavl to join his unmarried sisters, Vera and Ludmila, who shared an apartment that was a popular meeting place for revolutionaries.

Menzhinsky joined the "boycottists", led by Lenin's rival, Alexander Bogdanov, and joined the editorial board of their journal Vpered, but when the Vpered faction split, Menzhinsky aligned himself with the self-proclaimed "Orthodox Marxists", Grigory Aleksinsky and Mikhail Pokrovsky, rejecting the concept of proletarian culture developed by Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky.

Only now and then would an ingratiating smile or secret play of the eyes betray his eagerness from insignificance ... No-one took any notice of Menzhinsky, so quietly toiling away over his papers.

"[5] He was master of more than 10 languages[6] (including Korean, Chinese, Turkish, and Persian, the last one learned especially in order to read works by Omar Khayyám).

After the February Revolution of 1917, Menzhinsky returned to Russia in the summer of that year and joined the Mezhraiontsy, an independent faction whose leading figure was Leon Trotsky who merged with the Bolsheviks in August 1917.

According to G. von Schantz, Menzhinsky "personally conducted the wrecking of the Russian banks, a maneuver that deprived all opponents of Bolshevism of their financial means of warfare."

Menzhinsky played a great role in conducting the secret Trust and Sindikat-2 counterintelligence operations, in the course of which leaders of large anti-Soviet centers abroad, Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly, were lured to the Soviet Union and arrested.

[citation needed] Menzhinsky spent his last years as an invalid, suffering from acute angina since the late 1920s, which rendered him incapable of physical exertion.